Objective: Adimo wanted to leverage AI to help client managers spend more time with clients
Results: 5 hours saved on internal admin tasks per week for each CS Manager
Who are you and tell me a bit more about Adimo?
I’m Sam, I lead our customer success team at Adimo. We exist to help brands kill off those dead end consumer journeys where you send them to nothing. We provide a shopable integration layer which helps customers to close the loop and enables conversion of marketing campaigns.
Can you describe the many ways in which your company is integrating AI?
We’re right at the beginning of our AI journey. One of the big things we’re looking at the moment is how we bring AI into our customers’ world. We collect a lot of data as part of our role and what we do is take the insights out of that data. Right now we have a project which is looking at how we can use AI to do that for clients or better guide them, and bring to light the most pertinent pieces of information so they can make better actions off the back of it. Another big project is via our customer success team. We just recently started using AI via Kaizan and that is helping us collect customer information which otherwise goes slightly under the radar in terms of customer interactions and work out how we best act on that using AI.
What are the main objectives and opportunities you want to achieve with AI?
There’s a couple of things we want to achieve, one of those is to definitely look at how we can work smarter using AI in our tech stack. It’s not just about how we save time but how we look at things differently using AI to create a more uniform experience. In the world of Client Services you are always dealing with individuals and individuals have personalities, that’s part of the beauty of it. Sometimes you also want to make sure that people are taking a similar approach to things to speed up processes and thats where AI can help to work its magical way and provide answers that people may not have come up with themselves.
What are clients demanding of you when it comes to the usage of AI?
Right now clients aren’t specifically asking us anything about AI but if you think about general client demands people always want more, that want better, they want it quicker, they want more in depth insights. Those are the things which AI are helping us to achieve. Because the other options are trying to throw thousands of people at problems which obviously isn’t scalable for any agency.
How has AI improved the way you deliver services to clients at Adimo?
One of the major things AI is helping us with is in delivery of service to clients and generally being more present. Kaizan has a plugin which joins all our calls and is taking notes, which enables us to take a more hands free approach. Our teams are not having to sit and scribble down notes the whole call, which always takes actually quite a big part of your brain and all the time you’re concentrating on writing that note down you’re not concentrating on what the client said or giving an intelligent response to the client. So that’s a huge way that AI is impacting us, by enabling us to be fully present in those client interactions because they’re one of the most valuable things that we have and that’s how we build our relationships with clients.
Have you faced any challenges due to the rollout of AI at Adimo?
I don’t think we have faced any huge challenges. We have employees who have questions, but they’re mainly in relation to our clients and how our clients would think about it or react because some of our clients are large global organizations and they may have rules and regulations around use of AI. Internally we’re pretty forward thinking so I think it’s been really well received and the biggest challenge is trying to learn how to do the things that do manually usually and let the AI do it.
What do you hope to see from AI in the future?
There are a few different facets but one thing I would like to see AI help with is the data piece. Whatever world you’re in these days there’s a huge amount of data surrounding you and most of it I would confidently say is underutilized. Most people don’t have the time or the capacity to process all the data they have available to them. Regardless of what industry you’re in you’re probably not making the most of all of the information you have and I believe AI can really help us capitalize on all of that information to do something useful with it. That then cascades down to the client experience and how you interact with clients and the value they receive from the service you provide and that’s what I would really like to see from AI. Taking a huge amount of that manual manpower and brand power out of the equation and doing some of that calculation. Rather than being stuck in spreadsheets for hours, using AI to provide you with some cool pieces of information which you can then act on.
What would you say to anyone unsure of implementing AI into their Client Services team?
For Client Service leaders, AI is definitely something you should have considered if you haven’t already, but if you’re still considering it and you’re fence sitting then go for it. It’s a time saver which can provide you as a leader with good insights which will save you and your team time. It reduces the manual tasks that we all know eats up time for your team members which better enables them to do the strategic work that gives your clients a better experience and gives your team members a better experience in their job, which keeps people within the team.
What are the benefits you’ve seen from using Kaizan and what are your favorite features?
My favorite feature in Kaizan, is the transcribed calls. They are better than taking notes and you’ve got an accurate record to refer back to. What’s more, you can ask Kaizan to summarize what the actions are for you, and write follow up emails which saves so much time. Everything is just there. I love that. I also love the dashboard and the emails I get through which give me an indication of what’s changed in our accounts and where client sentiment might be up or down. It gives me an opportunity to dive into some things that I might not have otherwise been able to see because i’m not joining every call and I’m not on every email thread so that’s really helpful.
Who are you and tell me a bit more about Adimo?
Hi. I’m Steph, I’m in the customer success team as an account director.
How is AI affecting your role as an account director?
AI is affecting my role in two main ways. One is in terms of the way in which we work internally, our processes and efficiencies and the other way is from our clients. It’s definitely a buzzword at the moment so clients are curious to understand how we’re using it as a business for the future.
What is the hardest thing about being a Client Services manager?
The hardest thing about being a Client Services manager is keeping on top of a very broad and wide to do list. I tend to be a linchpin between many of the teams internally and making sure that projects are delivered on time and within margins. That said I also have the external teams and stakeholders to manage as well so it’s a lot of different spinning plates.
What changes do you think AI will bring to your role in the next few years?
AI will help Client Service teams in the future by taking away a lot of the donkey jobs, the lower value tasks to free up time to focus on the valuable strategic money making work instead.
What are clients demanding of you when it comes to AI?
Clients are demanding a lot in terms of AI because they’re seeing it all over the press, on LinkedIn and at conferences. One of the biggest problems that we face is that clients don’t really know what they want to do with it, they just know that they need to be doing something with it so they remain competitive.
The flip side is that they have a lot of cool ideas, which come with a lot of challenges, particularly in terms of procurement and legal teams. We are constantly trying to find the middle ground of doing something cool, whilst not impacting brand security or creating issues.
What are the benefits you’ve seen from using Kaizan and what are your favorite features?
I’ve been using Kaizan for a while now and it’s amazing. I’ve seen it evolve and help me with lots of different things. Probably the biggest thing that it does for me is attend all my meetings, which gives me that peace of mind that no key pieces of information are being missed and it handily writes up the key actions as well as high and low sentiment points for me afterwards. I feel clear and confident in what I need to do, and I copy and paste those into follow-up emails, saving me time. In the future, it would be amazing if Kaizan could send follow-up emails for me. Also, it would be great if it could learn what works for each client and recommend to me what words to use, what time of day I should be contacting clients, all of that kind of nuance that as human beings we don’t have time to go back and look at and put it into action using data.
